UVa Astronomy News Picture Archive

February 2011

This is a small extract from a huge mosaic of images of the deep
universe. The original mosaic was assembled from hundreds of
exposures taken with the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the
Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope. More
than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this
unprecedented, panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies
stretching back through most of the universe's history, covering a
portion of the southern field of a large galaxy census called the
Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS). Such a detailed view
of the universe has never before been assembled with this much color,
clarity, accuracy, and depth. The closest galaxies, seen in the
foreground, emitted their observed light about a billion years ago.
The farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks, are seen as
they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million
years after the Big Bang. Ultraviolet light taken by WFC3 shows the
blue glow of hot, young stars in galaxies teeming with star birth. The
orange light reveals the final buildup of massive galaxies about 8
billion to 10 billion years ago. The near-infrared light displays the
red glow of very distant galaxies---in a few cases as far as 12 to 13
billion light-years away---whose light has been stretched, from
ultraviolet light to longer-wavelength infrared light due to the
expansion of the universe.